Precious Photo Gift Idea to Buy for Your Adoptive Mom

A healing dreamscape featuring Liz’s biological mother (upper right as an adult)

and in B/W (as a young woman). Liz's adoptive parents hang on a wall (above the Easter basket).

I have this belief. When adopted kids are all grown-up with kids of their own, I believe true maturity blossoms - maturity that allows them to finally put their teenage angst and abandonment issues behind them and see their adoptive mom for who she really is. Their mom.

These days, the p.c. thing is for adoptive moms to present their child with a scrapbook that traces their adoption journey when their child is deemed "ready" (something that's occurring at an ever more tender age.) I propose doing it the other way around. Why not have the adult daughter or son give their adopted mom a personalized photo collage gift that traces their adoptive mother's love, from before you were even born to the adult child you are today! Give it to her on Mother's Day, when you've been a parent yourself for a couple of years and know what it means to bond with your child.

Not long ago, I created a custom photo collage for a biological mom to give to her daughter, showing her the many things she had in common with her daughter, down to the way they wore their hair, or the many Celtic and Polish connections that flowed through their lives by birth or marriage. The photo collage also paid its respects to the parents who raised Liz. In a 19th century Polish kitchen that anchors the photo collage, I hung a photo of Liz's adoptive parents' from a little peg, highlighting their faces in a warm light.

Since making that custom photomontage, I've thought many times that one day Liz will make her adoptive mom a present as well. For now, the photomontage is seen through the lense of Liz's biological mother. I believe every adoptive mom would relish a photo gift celebrating the sacrifices they made to find you, the love of their life. You might even want to accompany your photo gift with a letter or poem where you can pour out all the feelings you never gave voice to before. The voice that answers those nagging worries of the adoptive mom, like:

• Am I a good parent?
• Does my daughter know how much I love her?
• Am I putting up with her nonsense some days, only because I'm scared of what she's really feeling?

Make Mom a Heroic Photo Collage Gift

Here's how I would get started on a heroic Mother's Day photo gift for your adoptive moms:

1. Interview your mom about your adoption and the journey to find you. Type while she's talking or turn on a digital tape recorder. Use photographs to help jog her memory. Ask her how she felt, how she fought for you, and where she got the courage to do the things she did.
2. Collect the photos the agency or orphanage clipped to your file from the very beginning.
3. Grab any maps to these faraway places. Identify with arrows exactly where she found you. Embellish the page with her plane tickets.
4. Make a copy of every form Mom personally filled out and tear out the portions where you see her handwriting.
5. Find the first photos where she holds you in her arms, as well as the best pictures of the two of you at every point in your life up till now.

Now here's the important part. Enlist a talented digital artist to incorporate all these photos into a beautiful non-linear photo collage or dreamscape.

If you have some concerns about how to pull this off, read my FAQs --

Q: What if I don't have a great photograph of the two of us together at that point in time?
A: A really good digital artist can take entirely different photos and seamlessly combine them as if everybody was already there and somebody snapped the picture!

Q: What if I can’t find any pictures of Mom at the orphanage in China or Russia?
A: With amazing picture-sharing sites like Flickr and WebShots, a digital artist can track down photographs from the most obscure spots in the world, and ask permission from the photographer to use them in your custom photo collage for a small fee, or no fee at all!

I promise that as you go through the process of tracing your mother’s love, you will become the Family Historian and Guardian Angel. And when you present your personalized photo gift on Mother’s Day, you’re going to walk on water. But then again, you always did, and always will.

Healing Artwork for a Death Bed Refresh

Four pictures of Lyuba plus one chimpanzee

collaged together in an apple orchard.

You can love a person to their last dying day, and still not want to remember a thing about their dying. That's normal. It's also a fact that we have little control over memory. The shock of watching a person leave this world for the next seems to engrave itself on our very subconscious.

A year ago, I started to work with a family where the grandmother was beginning a steady physical decline: portly in her 60s, 70s and 80s she was now sunken and frail. Yet even before this physical decline, Lyuba’s family saw a creeping negativity begin to color her features and knit her brows. “I’m not an idiot,” she’d say. “I know what you’re up to.” If Lyuba was in slightly better spirits, she’d call her daughter-in-law a Petty Sadist, or an “Artistka” (as in con artist).

For a pediatrician who loved castor oil and the miracle cures in her Russian language health magazine, Lyuba now was a guarded patient who wouldn’t take her medicine. Why should she? She had seniority over most of her doctors. Of course, she knew better how her body would process the dose ….

In the last week of Lyuba’s life, when low caloric intake reduced her body to sinew, her grandson came to say goodbye. To make a record of her life, he took photos of everything in her apartment. The very last picture he took of his grandmother was from her bedroom doorway. What you see is a kind of tent: someone in bed with their knees pulled up under the sheets. Behind the knees to the right is Lyuba’s face tilted upwards, her mouth open in a dark, shapeless maw. Two days later when the phone call came, Lyuba’s 56 year old son came to supervise the ambulance attendant and give comfort to the caregiver. What his son recorded on film is more or less what he saw too in those early morning hours.

After everyone paid their respects and the family cleaned out Lyuba’s apartment, the number of Lyuba photographs in his possession rose dramatically. Yet however much he tried, that last dying day became the only picture of her he could keep in his mind’s eye. He'd try to refresh the picture, but the photos kept reflecting back the same image … something straight out of Munch’s “The Scream.”

For a time, his wife tried re-framing the photos and putting them in contemporary frames: Lyuba as an army nurse, Lyuba on cross country skis, Lyuba on the floor playing with her grandson (the one who would come to take her death bed picture). But the attempt at making the Lyuba Photos look like antique accessories was still misfiring. Now the son couldn't get Lyuba’s last dying year out of his mind, and was beginning to feel guilty about it. Why was this happening?

Falling in Love With Multiple Personalities

To remember Lyuba as a more integrated personality, we decided to co-create a “new and improved” Lyuba. Using the medium of digital photomontage, we'd contain all her former selves in one location! For this I needed all the photos of Lyuba at a certain age (in her 70s and 80s) when she was most likely to be wearing a favorite green pantsuit – a polyester number worn with the same white blouse. We ended up with four full body photos of Lyuba in her green pantsuit: two of Lyuba picking apples in Indiana; one of Lyuba biting her lip as she stands – a bit out of sorts - on a foreign street and another of Lyuba resting her head on her son’s shoulder at her 75th birthday.

The most intriguing part of the photomontage is seeing that Indiana orchard populated with four Lyubas, loving one another in a sisterly, motherly or childlike way. The multiplicity effect is nothing short of stunning because it proves that the root of Lyuba’s more negative, cynical self - and her more naïve, trusting self – no doubt existed some time before her dying days. Ultimately, you can’t help but fall in love with all her multiple personalities.

A friend once sighed how she wished she could capture how funny her mother really was and how much they made each other laugh. Part of what was so sad about her mother’s death at 62 was how close they had become just in the last few years. Now every time she thought of her mother, Marlene couldn’t conjure up the vivacious, funny woman she remembered. She could only see the more recent image of her mother emaciated from cancer.

“It’s as if time collapses,” Marlene would tell me. “Like one of those timelines of earth’s history you see in text books – a yardstick long. Here are these different developments – and then there’s mankind, and it’s infinitesimal!” For Marlene and for many of us, all we ever want is a way to magnify those tiny little ticks on the yardstick we call Life.

People often ask: why in that apple orchard did I decide to drape Lyuba’s arm around a chimpanzee instead of her own son? Here is my answer: magic in symbolism. The year in which Lyuba died was The Year of the Monkey. Tradition has it that monkeys possess the complete opposite extremes of character: foolishness and accountability. “It is because monkeys are most similar to human beings … reflections of man as represented in animal form,'' explains Lee Tae-hee, researcher at the National Folk Museum of Korea.


By making Lyuba’s object of affection a monkey– I am creating a piece of artwork that begs for interpretation. Is Lyuba nurturing those two extreme qualities of foolishness and accountability in herself? Is she deriving sustenance from the chimp, and that’s why she appears in all those incarnations, full of purpose and pep? In therapeutic photomontage, there is a time to keep family in and a time to keep family out, depending on who’s the patient. In this story, it was important to take Lyuba’s multiple selves out on a class outing … and leave the family at home.

A Creative Sympathy Gift for the Motherless Child

Photomontage enhanced by the symbolism of two

chocolate kisses, sitting on a couch against a graffiti wall.

When my mom died, grief grabbed me so tightly I could barely breathe. It wouldn’t have mattered whether I had dreamt the exact hour and minute she would pass away, or if we had fought like cats and dogs the night before. The next day was a black day.

Had I been unable to move past my sadness, I probably would have turned to secular or faith-based bereavement programs. Luckily, I didn’t have to. Time healed me. But 25% of people’s hearts live “in a place whose size is zero,” (a line borrowed from my wise old son, Sam). These are human beings who don’t have the energy to seek out new objects of affection. They live inside their heads, poring over the same photographs, allowing happy memories and catastrophe scenarios to fight for the same airtime. Outside, the real world looms, an unholy place filled with happiness and irony. In a word, they’re Profoundly Depressed.

Now to some of us, all that melancholy comes off looking almost martyr-ish. Wouldn’t they be happier if they just packed away the triggers that make them sad? Or is there something else we could be doing with those photographs to make them smile more and ache less? Something life-changing that when they see it, they’ll burst out crying - only not tears of sadness, but tears of joy?

There is, and it’s called therapeutic photomontage: a custom portrait of the departed composed from multiple, superimposed photos.


Dreaming Their Way Back to Happiness

The Profoundly Depressed want nothing better than to wake up from their nightmare. So it’s no leap of faith for them to embrace a wishful reality where salvation is almost palpable. No other medium has this uncanny ability to make a believer out of those in quiet despair than digital photomontage. Playing with the people, objects and landscapes in a personal photograph, a digital artist attuned to healing can create an entirely custom made reality, layering different elements into a single photograph until it feels like a snapshot from a dream ... and not a nightmare.

If you know someone who's profoundly depressed, here's what you can suggest. Say you found an artist who's helping you make a healing dreamscape about Aunt Myra. (As if it's already in the works.) Tell her it’ll contain everything she loves about Aunt Myra, and will show it in a completely magical way. Ask for favorite photographs of Myra, but also ask Myra's friends, family members and caregivers for photographs so you can have yet another perspective. Narrow down to candid photos where everybody's expression feels authentic – in other words, no forced smiles or awkward poses. Don’t worry if there aren’t any good photographs of Myra with, let's say, her husband or her favorite poodle. A good digital artist can extract Uncle Sid and the poodle from other photos, and then expertly reorient Sid and the poodle to look as if they're engaging with Myra right there in the picture.

You remember when I said “a digital artist attuned to healing”? These sought after artists specialize in art for your sake. What this means is that your insights and their intuition greatly affect the piece you co-create together. That's why you don't want to spare a single detail. Tell them the back story on every photograph, but also about the Black Day itself, and ghostly visitations, too (anecdotes provide strong visuals). You see, everything is relevant when it concerns the sad person’s state of mind before and after the loss.

In the therapeutic photomontage, the more depth of field there is, the truer the shadows and the more realistic an object’s scale, the more believable it is as wishful reality. The idea is to make the healing dreamscape as ripe for interpretation as possible. Allowing the Profoundly Deoressed to make as many free associations as they want is an integral part of the therapeutic process. It lets them actually see a new beginning … or even an alternate ending to the past.

Ideally, the dreamscape holds everything and anything. It's a place of comfort, and also of safety. The God-Fearing are likely to feel less oppressed as they realize they’re not inherently unlucky or a target, and that the Black Day was merely a random act. In a similar vein, the God-less begin to look at their lives more philosophically, less judgmentally and richer in meaning.

By definition, everything in a dreamscape holds meaning, and this is no accident. A sensitive artist deliberately puts them in to draw out the Profoundly Depressed in an imaginative way. That’s why they often add unique objects which evoke specific memories and feelings – say, a spinning apple, a runner's bib, a cascade of rose petals – if the interpretation invites playfulness and not a feeling of dread.

By revealing hidden messages, the dreamscape appears to talk to the Profoundly Sad, while also giving them someone to talk to. It erases that sinking feeling we've all felt at one time or another when we got separated from Mom in the department store: Hey, you left me behind.